A very exciting post yesterday on LinkedIn (but visible even if you don’t have an account) from Leonardo Costantini:
Yesterday marked the beginning of a new phase of Digital Humanities applied to manuscript studies.
Imagine a hyperspectral imaging system that weighs 500 grams and gives you instantaneous results, making the post-processing of the images easy and accessible. Its name is ChromaMapper. It’s being developed by PyrOptik Instruments Limited and it will be a gamechanger!
Designed by Dr Mary Stuart, Lecturer at the University of Derby, with the collaboration of Matt Davies and Elizabeth Allen from PyrOptik Instruments Limited, we tested their prototype on the manuscript fragments at the Special Collections of the University of Bristol. Our thanks to Emma Howgill for the kind collaboration.
It has been a mind-blowing experience, and it was so exciting to see the results seconds after the digitisation.
There are no further details, except that the hope is that it should be relatively cheap. The PyrOptik website is here.
This would revolutionise manuscript studies. There must be acres of unsuspected palimpsests out there, reused parchment with an unsuspected lower text.